know how. My Lord was the only one who understood."

"Understood? Understood what?"

"Who understood me, and who understood God."

"Clarice, what manner of tongue art thou talking? 'Tis none I never
learned."

No, for Clarice was beginning to lisp the language of Canaan, and "they
that kept the fair were men of this world." What wonder if she and her
thoroughly time-serving mother found it impossible to understand each
other?

"I cannot make thee out, lass. If thou wert aware afore thou wert wed
that thou hadst a vocation, 'twas right wicked of thee not to tell thy
confessor and thy mistress, both. But I cannot see how it well could,
when thou wert all head o'er ears o' love with some gallant or other--
the saints know whom. I reckon it undecent, in very deed, Clarice, to
meddle up a love-tale with matters of religion. I do wonder thou hast
no more sense of fitness and decorum."

"It were a sad thing," said Clarice quietly, "if only irreligious people
might love each other."

"Love each other! Dear heart, thy brains must be made o' forcemeat!
Thou hast got love, and religion, and living, and all manner o' things,
jumbled up together in a pie. They've nought to do with each other,
thou silly lass."

"If religion has nought to do with living, Dame, under your good
pleasure, what has it to do with?"

A query which Dame La Theyn found it as difficult to comprehend as to
answer. In her eyes, religion was a thing to take to church on Sunday,
and life was restricted to the periods when people were not in church.
When she laid up her Sunday gown in lavender, she put her religion in
with it. Of course, nuns were religious every day, but nobody else ever
thought of such an unreasonable thing. Clarice's new ideas, therefore,
to her, were simply preposterous and irrational.

"Clarice!" she said, in tones of considerable surprise, "I do wonder
what's come o'er thee! This is not the lass I sent to Oakham. Have the
fairies been and changed thee, or what on earth has happened to thee? I
cannot make thee out!"

"I hardly know what has happened to me," was the answer, "but I think it
is that I have gone nearer God. He ploughed up my heart with the furrow
of bitter sorrow, and then He made it soft with the dew of His grace. I
suppose the seed will come next. What that is I do not know yet. But
my knowing does not matter if He knows."

The difference which Dame La Theyn failed to understand was the
diff